Source: VOA
The Obama administration on Thursday said it does not believe that Iran can
enrich uranium at the level it claims it can. White House officials say work is
underway for stronger international sanctions against Iran.
Nuclear fuel plan in Isfahan, Iran
Iran says the nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes
The Obama administration is brushing aside Iran's
claim that it has enriched uranium at a higher level, possibly high enough to
make a nuclear weapon.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad's Thursday statement is based on politics, not physics. "He says
many things and many of them turn out to be untrue. We do not believe they have
the capability to enrich [uranium] to the degree to which they now say they are
enriching," he said.
At a White House briefing, Gibbs criticized Iran for rejecting an offer brokered
by the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, last year to ship uranium
out of Iran, enrich it and return it for use in medical research. "Not taking
the IAEA up and its partners up on a very commonsense offer, leads, quite
frankly, the world to believe that Iran has other ideas," he said.
Gibbs said that rejection, coupled with Iran's recent statements and actions,
compels the United States and other nations to pursue stronger sanctions.
Although U.S President Barack Obama had set a deadline at the end of last year
for Iran to comply with a request for talks, his spokesman Robert Gibbs noted
that work toward tougher sanctions continues. "This was not going to happen in
Times Square [in New York City] when the ball hit zero [i.e., at 12:00 a.m. on
January 1st of this year]. This was always going to take some important time,"
he said.
Gibbs could not confirm whether China will support more sanctions on Iran, but
he held out hope that it would. "We believe the Chinese have and will continue
to play a constructive role. They worked with us very constructively on the U.N.
sanctions dealing with North Korea. And we believe and I think they believe, it
is not in their interest to have a worldwide arms race, and certainly not in
their interest economically to have an arms race in the Middle East," he said.
One day earlier, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed new sanctions on Iran,
freezing the assets in U.S. jurisdiction of a general in Iran's Revolutionary
Guard and four subsidiaries of a construction company he owns.
... Payvand News - 02/12/10 ... --
